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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Virtual Events

Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Sessions, Day Two

Included below are videos from the following sessions:

  • Using Innovation To Reduce Food Waste – James Rogers (Apeel), Chiara Cecchini (Future Food Institute), Alexandria Coari (ReFED), Moderator: Jenn Marston (The Spoon)
  • Doing The Impossible: In Conversation with Pat Brown
  • Let’s Print Some Meat – a demo of Novameat’s 3D meat printer
  • From The Reviewer: What Makes A Good – or Bad – Tech-Powered Kitchen Product? – Lisa McManus (America’s Test Kitchen), Joe Ray (Wired) and Michael Wolf (The Spoon)
  • How AI is Reshaping Food Development – Riana Lynn (Journey Foods), Oliver Zahn (Climax Foods)
  • Fermentation: The Next Frontier for Foodtech Thomas Jonas (Nature’s Fynd), Brian Frank (FTW Ventures)
  • Building The New Food Platforms Mike Leonard (Motif Foodworks), Catherine Lamb (The Spoon alum) Creating a Multi-Product Future Food Company – Josh Tetrick (Eat Just), Jenn Marston (The Spoon)
  • Meet The Authors: Decoding the World with Po Bronson & Arvind Gupta – Po Bronson (Indiebio), Arvind Gupta (Genesis Consortium)
  • The Next-Gen Microwave: AI, Precision, Personalized – Steve Drucker
  • Workshop: Building a Connected Kitchen Product – Larry Jordan (Microsoft)
  • Table Talk: Product Innovation in the Future Kitchen – Jane Freiman, Greg Fish (SharkNinja), Surj Patel
  • The Asia Future Food Market – Winnie Leung (Bits x Bites), Michal Klar
  • The Japan Food Tech Revolution – Akiko Okada and Hirotaka Tanaka, SKS Japan

 

If you purchased a ticket to SKS and have not received your Spoon Plus account activation, drop us a line.

If you didn’t attend SKS and would like to see these sessions, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus here.

Day Two @ SKS: Meet Impossible Foods’ CEO, Print Some Meat & Talk Asia Food Tech

Wow, what a first day at Smart Kitchen Summit. We learned that the recipe is alive and well (sorry, Tyler Florence), hacked together new kitchen products with Scott Heimendinger and saw a live debut of a new pizza robot, not to mention all the great in-person meetings, breakout sessions, vendor demos and more.

And we’re just getting started. Here are a few of the things we have in store for day two:

Impossible’s Pat Brown: Washington Post’s Maura Judkis will talk to Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown about a year of massive growth for the company, the rapidly changing alt-protein market and more.

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick: We’ll hear from the CEO of Eat Just, Josh Tetrick, about why they are one of the very few companies trying to build both plant-based and cell-based meat products.

Food Waste Innovation: The Spoon’s Jenn Marston will talk to Apeel CEO James Rogers, Chiara Cecchini of the Future Food Institute and Alexandria Coari of ReFED about the impact of COVID on food waste innovation

Meat Printer! We’ll head to Spain for a live demo as Novameat CEO shows off his plant-based 3D meat printer in action

Startup Showcase Show & Tell: The show and tell portion of our Startup Showcase will allow you to head into the labs, home offices and headquarters of the 10 finalists where you’ll get to see things like contactless food kiosks, cellular aquaculture, food robots and much more.

Book Debut: Listen in as IndieBio managing director (and longtime tech journalist) Po Bronson and IndioBio Founder and current partner at Mayfield Arvind Gupta talk about their long journey around the world as they worked on their book, Decoding The World.

Table Talk about Cell-Based Meat With Paul Shapiro : I’ll lead an interactive conversation with the author of Clean Meat and CEO of Better Company about the market dynamics around the cell-based meat industry.

Build a Connected Kitchen Product: Microsoft principal IoT engineer Larry Jordan will show you how to build your own smart kitchen device and show off his newly open-sourced hardware and software that will help others get going.

Asia Food Tech: Join us at the end of the day as we head to Asia to talk with others about the fast-changing food tech landscape across Asia and get an update on the Japanese food tech scene from SKS Japan’s Akiko Okada.

If you’d like to join us, you can buy a discounted ticket for days two and three here.

If you missed our coverage from yesterday, here is some of the coverage from The Spoon:

What Does It Take to Build a Cell-Based Protein Business? – What can companies in the space do to help cell-based protein scale to address issues like global food security and environmental sustainability? That’s a topic FTW Ventures’ Brian Frank discussed at this week’s SKS 2020 show, where he was joined by Benjamina Bollag, the founder and CEO of HigherSteaks, and Justin Kolbeck, CEO and cofounder of Wild Type.

Middleby Unveils the PizzaBot 5000, Which Assembles a Pizza in Under 1 Minute – Lab2Fab, a division of Middleby Corporation, unveiled its new PizzaBot 5000 pizza-assembling machine at the Smart Kitchen Summit.

Should We Ditch the Term “Vending Machine?” – Megan Mokri, Co-Founder and CEO of Byte Technologies, Chloe Vichot, Co-Founder and COO of Fresh Bowl, talked with Chris Albrecht about a range of topics impacting the unattended food vending services, including COVID-19, machine vandalism, and whether “vending machine” is a good term.

First Beer, Now Meat: How Yeast Can Help Us “Reinvent Our Food Structures”

Yeast is a hot topic of conversation these days: where to find it, what you’re baking with it, and how to create your own at home.

Sudeep Agarwala, a yeast geneticist at Ginkgo Bioworks, has you covered for that last one. He rose to Twitter fame not long ago after tweeting DIY instructions for how to make yeast out of what’s hiding in your cupboard.

But Agarwala knows a lot more about yeast than just how to hack it to make your own sourdough. For that reason, we invited him to speak at our latest virtual event, From Sourdough to The End of Meat.

Agarwala started off his presentation with a massive timeline outlining the evolution of humans. He specifically pointed to 10,000 BC — the time when we first started to use yeast to ferment food and drink. Our newfound love of yeast completely changed the trajectory of how we ate food, ushering in new foods like bread and beer. “We’re now at an age when we’re thinking about reinventing our food structures yet again,” Agarwala said.

If you’re curious about how yeast will shake up our food system, you should watch the whole conversation. You can find the recording here. Here are a few big takeaways (featuring a guest appearance by yours truly!):

Yeast could mean the end of meat
Ginkgo Biowork’s spinoff company, Motif Foodworks, uses microbes like yeast to create the flavor elements that can better mimic meat. According to Agarawala, technology can help make meat alternatives taste even more like the real thing.

Only recently, said Agarwala, has yeast technology evolved to the point where it actually has a shot at replacing the key flavors of meat. “I may get in trouble for saying this,” he said. “We’re on the verge of eliminating meat from our diets altogether.”

Yeast isn’t the only microbe out there
“I love yeast, but there are other microbes that are working for us as well,” noted Agarwala. He pointed to air protein, which can sequester carbon from carbon dioxide, as well as microbes that can fix nitrogen. These technologies leverage microbes to not only produce an output, such as protein, but also reduce the ecological cost of creating food.

Algae and bacteria are also able to make other foods (like your kombucha SCOBY). “There’s a whole microbial world sitting in your kitchen cupboard,” Agarawala pointed out.

What about my sourdough starter???
Bread makers, don’t worry — Agarwala had plenty of insight into how we’re all working with yeast during the pandemic. But he also had some thoughts on why sourdough starters could be an important tool for the future of fermentation in general.

“Yeast is a technology,” he said. “Maybe now that we’re seeing this technology growing on our counters, it is going to be more comfortable to think about, ‘What else can this technology do for us?'”

Perhaps since we’re all obsessed with yeast now, consumers will be more open to new foods grown from microbes — such as meat — down the road.

Our next Spoon Virtual Event is on May 28th at 10am PT, where Spoon founder Mike Wolf will speak with the Design for Food team at IDEO about how we design for a more resilient food system in a post-COVID world. Sign up here.

Join Us and Seattle Food Geek for a Free Virtual Workshop on Building Next-Gen Kitchen Tech

Back when I learned Scott Heimendinger (aka the Seattle Food Geek) was leaving Modernist Cuisine, I immediately wondered what he was going to build next. After all, Scott is the guy who basically invented the consumer sous vide circulator, arguably the biggest kitchen cooking creation the last decade outside of the Instant Pot.

While Scott plans to keep much of what he’s building under wraps for the time being, that won’t stop me from trying to pry as much info as I can from him next week when he welcomes us into his home workshop to show off how he thinks about and prototypes next-generation kitchen technology.

We’ll also be joined by Larry Jordan, a long-time chef and kitchen tech maker who is known for bringing crazy cool ideas like a connected salumi maker to life.

If you’d like to join us for an interactive conversation and get a peek at both Scott and Larry’s workshops as well as into how they innovate and prototype and innovate new kitchen tech, you’ll want to join us next Tuesday April 21st for our live interactive event, Building The Future Kitchen: Rapid Prototyping Your Way to A Next-Generation Kitchen Product.

Come armed with questions and ideas for Scott and Larry to react to because we’re going to set aside plenty of time to take them. And who knows, maybe you can tease a secret or two out of Scott or Larry about their next big idea.

Sign up today!